


Hold Your Devil By His Spoke

by theravenchilde



Series: Mistbornstuck [1]
Category: Homestuck, Mistborn - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: F/M, alloy of law era, baby's first blackrom, knowledge of mistborn or homestuck is not essential to reading
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-09
Updated: 2014-11-09
Packaged: 2018-02-24 08:01:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2574128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theravenchilde/pseuds/theravenchilde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eridan stole Rose's writing spot. Rose knits him a scarf. They bitch at each other. It's the start of a beautiful hatefrienditude.</p><p>Also they have magic metal powers, if that's of any interest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hold Your Devil By His Spoke

**Author's Note:**

> a short prelude to the main Mistbornstuck verse.

     The aluminum-gilt door tinkled crisply as Rose entered the cafe. Aluminum was no match in sound quality compared to any other metal, but it was an easy way to show off one’s wealth. Rose’s own metal, electrum, was not nearly as expensive and for a skilled Allochemist like her mother was easy to procure in an Allomancer’s necessary alloy and quantities. Her mother’s lab’s clients were many of the patrons of this cafe. Restaurants and coffee shops like this one had sprung up all over Elendel in recent years, from full scale dining services to the low slung jazz clubs John and Dave frequented when they thought she wouldn’t notice. This cafe catered to the nobility in the 7th Octant of the city, largely merchants invested in the slowly growing sea trade. It was also frequented by dignitaries working in the nearby Alternian embassy. As such, it boasted spacious settings for privacy between tables and a gorgeous view of Hammondar Bay, and likely some of the best tea in the city. The place was well worth the expense and afforded Rose excellent stimuli with which to fight the writer’s block she was occasionally plagued with.

     Rose didn’t need to burn electrum as she ascended the polished stairs to the open terrace and main seating area. While seeing into her own future was useful at times, it was needless in as predictable a place as this cafe. She knew several of the waiters by name, and they knew both her order and her favorite table, nestled in a corner. In the early afternoon, it was unlikely to be occupied, and service was always fastest and quietest at that time. She would be free to work on a particularly sticky scene in her latest attempt at a novel, in which her young protagonist wizard apprentice must fight their way free of an enchanted tar pit (this… will probably need reworking), for as long as she wished. She threaded her way through the tables by muscle memory while she planned, and almost didn’t notice the boy at her table until she nearly ran into it.

     The sheer amount of lurid violet he was wearing caught her eye first. Dave would likely compare the cape spread over the back of the chair to “the abso-fucking-lutely tragic demise of the Velveteen Rabbit, skinned and dyed with the blood of a hundred glitter shitting blackberries and turned into a throw rug.” Second, his lips, black and defined and there is no chance this boy did not wear makeup those could not be natural. And the teeth behind them, bared and razored like a sea monster’s.

     “What,” he snapped, wavering on his w’s, “do you want miss, I am somewhat preoccupied an pardon me, but your interruptin’ has balled up my writin’. ‘less you have a reservation, do you mind?” He glowered at her for a moment, then schooled his sharp features into something less threatening, putting back the teeth behind his lips. His head was still tilted forward, towards her, jagged horns up. Rose had read this was a typical defensive body position for trolls, to both protect sensitive parts and prepare a weapon, like a human fingering a trigger.

     There was a troll sitting at her table, and he wanted her to leave. He was angry at her for a simple mistake, bumping into a table? Even John knew better than to be so rude when upset, and he still considered flatulence references to be the pinnacle of all humor. Primly, Rose stepped away from her table, straightened her notebook and bag in her arms, sniffed at the troll in her spot, and turned heel. She clicked her way across the room, landing in an wicker chair directly opposite him. He had watched her go with a roll of his eyes and a flick of the purple coif, but had returned his attention to the literally purple prose before him. 

     Her waiter, the short one with the kind voice, found her and brought her tea. “My deepest apologies, Miss Lalonde,” he murmured as he bent to leave her order on the side table, “but young Lord Ampora has been here for nearly two hours working on those letters of his, and today’s not your usual day to visit.” He stood up, eyes twinkling now. “Is there anything I may fetch you in order to make your exile from your treasured table more comfortable?” 

     Rose gave him a tight smile in return. “No, but thank you, Doulbet. My tea will suffice for now.”

     “Of course, yes, of course. If you have need of me, miss, you know how to summon me.” He straightened the clubs pinned to his lapel, smiled and bowed, and left her.

     She glanced back, while setting her notebook aside and pulling things from her bag. “Lord Ampora” was heavily invested in his work; there appeared to be flecks of purple on his hands and sleeves and likely on her table as well. The poor waitstaff would have to clean that off. The ink color was nearly an exact match for the stripe in his hair and the hue of the blood flushing his earfins. They twitched as he wrote, like a fish flicking its fins. It was an appropriate comparison. He was obviously a seadweller troll, considered nobility among their species. According to Rose’s research, of course. She’d never met a purple blooded troll like him before, and had only brief contact with a few trolls, all bluebloods, who were rich enough or worked for rich enough people to buy metals from her mother. They were uncommon in Elendel. There was fairly strict laws concerning where trolls could live and work in the city; they were only allowed free range within the 7th Octant, and most prefered to live in or near the embassy. She supposed there must be some who lived in the slums at the edges of the city, per the laws of basic economics, but their existence was outside the scope of her experience. John apparently knew a few trolls well, from working on various projects for his House (honest labor was character building, according to his father. Wisdom indeed, and Rose could not fault the logic that resulted in summers spent swinging massive hammers. She and Dave had brought John lunch once. The hushed spat afterwards was… interesting).

     Damn, he was looking up again. Settling back into her chair, she drew her needles from her beaded bag, larger than what was quite in fashion. However, it could carry both her yarn and her writing notebook, and was therefore precious to her. From the corner of her eye, Rose could see Ampora watching the needles, but the yarn made him lose interest. He was on three sheets of paper now, for one letter? Quite a lengthy treatise. She wondered who it was to.

     Rose was curious, now. Still mad, yes; Calmasis and their pits must be left to flounder for at least another week before she will be back in a writing mindset. But she’d never even spoken with a troll before, and only knew of them what rumors were published in the broadsheets and a few encyclopedic entries in books. And if she could somehow bully him into relinquishing her spot, just for the pleasure of winning back her rightful place? An added bonus. She would treat him as a psychological experiment. “The Effectiveness of Negative Reinforcement Patterns on the Troll Psyche,” or the like.

     Needles clacked as she planned her attack. Rose was quite accomplished at speed knitting, as it was often her main form of retaliation against John’s pranks and Dave’s baiting. The scarf she was starting now was only her first step in her plot. The strings flew together, carefully concentrating on her own work, but always watching from the peripherals. Storm blue, mainly blue and a dark sea green yarn. A bit of pure purple and light grey and a tiny few knots of orange. And yellow and white. Generous amounts of that. Pink for the writing, her mother’s favorite color. The knit itself was sloppy, not very tight, and would certainly stretch out to illegibility within a few days of wear. But it was certainly going to serve its purpose here.

     Rose held up the scarf occasionally to examine her work, making sure only parts of it could be seen at a time. The cafe steadily grew noisier as customers wandered in and out, businessmen with burly voices boasting and businesswomen neatly derailing them into preferable contracts, eating and negotiating before the early dinner rush. She couldn’t hear it, and refused to look up, but she could sense the purple fountain pen across the parlor slowing down every time she readjusted her position. At the very least, he was as interested in her… in her work as she was.

     The summer afternoon light dripped through the lightly shuttered windows, much of it coincidentally resting on Rose in a halo of gold and gentle bay breezes. She could not have asked for a more fortuitous showcase for her fast work. With consideration for the speed of construction and limited mental insight on the subject at hand, this was possibly one of her best jibes yet. While the knit itself was fairly basic, the detail was in the depiction. It was meant to be a sea and storm clouds, a few streaks of lightning. One streak made contact with the waves. Underneath the strike, crudely stitched, was a small pufferfish. Gray, with a single purple streak and thick black glasses on its tiny angry face and little orange horns. It was just big enough to be seen from across a large room. Finally, light gray stitches wrote out a caption for the piece in Alternian script. Rose was reasonably certain she’d translated correctly; Alternian was graphemically the same as standard Scadrian, although trolls had a much wider phonetic range. It read “Fuck this fish in particular,” a last addition for this masterpiece of an insult.

     Tying off the last knot and resting her needles in her lap, Rose closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She required a small amount of mental preparation in order to focus her mind and metal on what she wished to learn. While she could make assumptions, she didn’t actually know this Lord Ampora. Rose did not like to commit to an action without a certainty of its immediate outcome. Electrum was different from gold. General gold shadows would show you what you could have been, had a broad series of different choices been made, and could show the potential of years of your life being rewritten. Electrum had a far finer focus, sometimes merely seconds in the future. Rose’s power was particularly strong, and she had years of hard practice to refine her Sight. She could see the consequences of her actions with clarity and true insight, much like atium’s fabled acuity, up to many minutes ahead. While she had learned not to rely solely upon her Allomantic abilities, it had guided her through many struggles truly, and… this was just to be safe.

     She burned electrum. Rose’s eyes stayed closed, but she could See. Her electrum shadow was still in the wicker chair, doing nothing. Of course. Rose hadn’t yet decided whether or not she would display the scarf. A shadow in indecision was useless, but decisions could always be changed before they were acted upon. To show the scarf in one minute, Rose pressed her Sight a minute and a half ahead. Then two minutes. Then three. Then five. She was holding it still, first examining it, then staring ahead. With an eyebrow arched. Rose could feel her future shadow’s discomfort as she stared. She was having a staring contest? The feeling of triumph pervaded, and five minutes ahead there was a definite smirk on her shadow’s face. She was alive, and she’d won. That was all Rose needed.

     Extinguishing her electrum, Rose opened her eyes, and the warmth and certainty of her burning metal vanished, taking her shadow with it. Returning her needles and excess yarn to her bag, she shook out the scarf and held it up in the sun, as if to examine it critically. From behind, of course, which was not actually all that useful to a knitter. It wasn’t a very long one, maybe four feet, and not more than 6 inches wide. The pattern actually ran vertically; she’d begun knitting from the bottom up, so it was momentarily held upside down.

     Ampora was watching her already. His fins fanned out, bobbing as he tilted his head and peered at her work while trying to look like he wasn’t. She knew the moment he read the script, because they flushed and held out wide in shock, and then folded in like spines when shocked turned to insult as he glared at her, quite obviously now. The fuck is that, he mouths at Rose, shaking his head angrily. She raised an eyebrow in mock surprise, turned the scarf to look at it, then turned it back to him. A scarf, of course. He glared harder, fins flat against his hair, Fuckin’ rude, more like, and face the picture of indignation.

     Their staring matched stretched across the room and across minutes, waiting for the other to back down. No one else paid the teens mind, didn’t even see them.  
Finally, right as Rose’s eyes were starting to water, he turned away, smacking a hand to his face and giving her the finger simultaneously. Impressive.

     She left the scarf on her chair and left before Ampora looked up again, a token of her triumph. She could remake later, if she wished, in better quality. Her spot would still be there for her tomorrow, unoccupied. Hopefully, however, this would not be the last she saw of Lord Ampora. He needed a lecture on the rudeness of appropriation.

~

     Eridan flagged down a waiter, the one with the ashen pin on his lapel. He’d seen the man speaking with her. “The young lady, the one who left the scarf over there?” He asked, gesturing towards the empty wicker chair. “Who was she?”

     The waiter chuckled, “Miss Lalonde is a regular customer of ours. I’m afraid you stole her favorite writing spot, but it would have been terribly rude to oust you from it. Rose is an understanding young lady, upstanding family. Do you know the Lalondes?”

     “Naw,” Eridan replied, hastily. “But I intend to know them.” The waiter left him, and he sat, staring at that scarf. A small voice, deep in the back of his head, asked him quietly to make her pay.

     He was warming up to the idea, but only if she was really up for the challenge. Humans. They rarely were.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay: this is my first fic. Technically it's complete, but I do have more chapters planned out. However, it took me over a year to write this one, so don't expect anything any time soon. I'm posting this to lay official claim to the mistbornstuck tag on here and on tumblr, where you can also find updates from me (theravenchilde) and eventually I'll move everything to my mistbornstuck specific blog. There will actually be a main verse someday.
> 
> this ficlet was inspired by [this lovely art](http://k4rkl3s.tumblr.com/post/42174649089/every-time-eridan-sees-rose-at-the-coffee-shop) by [wolfpun](http://wolfpun.tumblr.com/).
> 
> thanks to my small pile of betas (queercoding, dub-in-life, ailavyn-siniyash) for letting me foist this upon them.
> 
> please feel free to critique me on my inaccurate knitting terminology.


End file.
